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New app brings 3D models to life

By | August 12, 2011, 7:39 PM PDT

Using Augmented Reality, a new app allows designers and would be designers to see what their creations would look like on actual ground with real sky above. SightSpace 3D provides a fast way of visualizing a design without computer rendering programs. The app enables mobile viewing of designs made in SketchUp, a 3D modeling program available for free from Google, on the iPad 2 and iPhone 4 using a live camera or photo function.

Augmented Reality is technology that pulls digital graphics into real world environments by placing them in a user’s field of vision. Instead of just pasting a view of a computer model in front of photo-realistic scenery, SightSpace 3D places the model into a user’s real time camera view. By positioning their iPad or iPhone cameras, users can feel like they are walking around and through their creations as they move through the actual space of the chosen site. So even people who have a hard time picturing how flat drawings translate into three dimensional objects can understand what a design will look like.

Limitless Computing, makers of the app, encourage mobile users and their clients to use the product in order to visualize projects prior to construction. The program can incorporate more than just landscape and vegetation, so any existing object such as furniture and art can be brought into the view, in real time, to create an immersive experience.

Watch a video of the app below:

via: Dexigner
Images: Limitless Computing

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Sun Joo Kim

About Sun Joo Kim

Sun Joo Kim is a contributing editor for SmartPlanet.

Sun Joo Kim

Sun Joo Kim

Contributing Editor, Architecture

Sun Joo Kim is an architect and creative consultant based in Boston. Her projects include design and master planning of museums, public institutions, hospitals, and university buildings across the U.S. She holds a degree from Carnegie Mellon University and is a member of the U.S. Green Building Council.

Follow her on Twitter.

Sun Joo Kim

Sun Joo Kim

Sun Joo is an independent architectural designer who contracts with design firms. She does not hold any investments in the companies she covers.

She writes for SmartPlanet and is not an employee of CBS.

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